If India ’s academia is dominated by Stalinist professors with their inflexible Marxist dogma, how does this reflect upon how people outside the country view Hinduism? In India secularism is a strange beast which constantly warns of the threats which Hindu fundamentalism and fascism pose to the very fabric of democracy yet having the gall to defend personal laws which keep the minority groups backward and introverted.
A speech by Narendra Modi is deemed a greater threat than terrorist attacks in Mumbai, or ethnic cleansing of Hindus at gunpoint from Kashmir , Kerala, Orissa, and the north-east. Now all this is well-mixed with blaming India ’s problems on the neo-colonialist West. Yet given the chance these champagne socialists jump on the next flight out of their claustrophobic workhouse (known in India as a ‘university’) to live happily ever after in Britain or best of all in that most hated behemoth of all, the USA .
Deemed backward and obscurantist by these Marxist academics, it was Hindu civilisation that led to some of the most important scientific discoveries of the age. Indeed the first known use of decimal digits that includes the indubitable appearance of a symbol for the digit zero, a small circle, appears on a stone inscription found at the Chaturbhuja Temple at Gwalior dated 876 AD. No ‘zero’, no binary, no calculus, and much else.
Indeed what we take for granted in mathematics, computing, astronomy, meteorology and the sciences as a whole would simply not exist. It is with this mindset, and no doubt the commercial value it entails, that Hindus have flocked to and flourished in the sciences.
Britain and America have imported Indian doctors en masse. Pioneers in Silicon Valley have also included disproportionate number of people with Indian origins. On the other hand humanities have been seen as the soft option.
This has allowed their domination by those with clear ideological agenda, in other words the Marxists. From their Ivory Tower Comintern at Jawaharlal Nehru University and elite institutions such as St Stephens College in Delhi , the idealistic and detached Swiss bank socialist kleptocracy brainwash generations of clones who are unable to think creatively. Mimicry and flattery is the key to success.
The closer one resembles a laboratory grown version of Romilla Thapar, the easier it is to be accepted. Anyone who dares challenge this Politburo is branded a heretic, in other words a communalist, fascist, fundamentalist, neo-colonialist, or worse.
Just as India exports its finest scientific minds, it also exports its Marxist professors. While the former have done much to develop their host countries information industries, some have even returned home from such lucrative careers in Silicon Valley . Risking everything they are India ’s budding entrepreneurs trying to help the masses left out of ‘Shining India’. From the microeconomic level, they bring literacy and modern technology skills where the kleptocratic state and its Stalinist functionaries failed to do in over sixty years.
But the Marxist professors are different. Just like the Communist Party elite in the former Warsaw Pact they may preach anti-capitalist idealism but they enjoy the jet-set lifestyle of lucrative research grants, secure tenure teaching posts, and other nice little perks.Lord Meghnad Desai was to the ‘imperialist’ West what Romilla Thapar has been to India : the first in a long line of now outdated and intellectually bankrupt Marxist propaganda machines spreading anti-Hindu hatred.
Attend any institution that specialises in teaching about South Asia and you will not have long to wait before encountering one of these manifestations.
In my own case it was Dr Sudipta Kaviraj at SOAS. Now Kaviraj was Associate Professor of Political Science at JNU, from where he had received his PhD. Prior to joining Columbia University , he was a professor in Politics in the Department of Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London .
He has now taken his career further by teaching at Columbia University in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. Kaviraj is part of the Subaltern Studies Collective which is an allusion to the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937).
Now Kaviraj was actually a well-respected addition to the Politics Department when I joined SOAS. An evidently intelligent and highly knowledgeable person it was a delight engaging with him. His manner was easily approachable and totally lacked the stuffiness, smugness and arrogance which one usually encounters with India ’s elite. Not one to shrink from reality and take refuse in his plush ivory tower, n discussing communalism in India , Kaviraj recounted how he himself had saved Sikh families in Delhi from being massacred following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984.
Nevertheless that was undercurrent in all this. Attacking that amorphous ‘communalism’. In his first ever lecture Kaviraj brazenly said
“I am not a Hindu”. He later elaborated: “I eat beef, I attend other religious festivals.”
Now growing up in Britain with school Christmas and Easter church services there was nothing unusual in all this. Indeed why should it be unusual in India where religious minorities persecuted elsewhere such as Jews, Parsees, Syrian Christians and Ahmadiyyas have always found sanctuary? Neither was Kaviraj’s point without merit.
Not only was it his choice to believe in what he wanted, but his point was how labels are used as identifier markers. In a powerful example Kaviraj said that by saying “I am not a Hindu”, if he was caught up in a communal riot between Hindus and Muslims, his frank admission of his personal beliefs would expose him as a target by Hindus.
Yet if he was asked his name and replied, then he would be labelled immediately as a ‘Hindu’ and targeted by Muslims. In the light of communal disturbances that swept India later that year following the destruction of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, his explanations were not without merit.
Unfortunately this was neutralised by the ideological undercurrent because attacking Hinduism was the plane ticket to success in South Asian studies. In discussing western-influenced reform movements such as the Brahmo Samaj in his native West Bengal , Kaviraj used to chuckle:
“It was easy to convert Hindus. All you had to do was to put some beef in their mouths.”
Now imagine how this would go down if said about certain other communities. It is not that what he said was inaccurate or misleading. But we must ask ourselves why the anti-Hindu double standards? On another occasion our learned professor was speaking about how useless it was worshipping Hindu deities. He mentioned “depletion of the sacred” in how drivers of taxis and scooters hung religious imagery in their vehicles.
To further rub the point Kaviraj spoke of how his own Bengali family could not even sacrifice an animal to Durga or Kali so “they had to use a cucumber”. Actually it was most likely to be a marrow. Pedantic points aside, would he dared have spoken about another religion like this?
Whenever I met Kaviraj even after graduating he was always courteous and welcoming. Until that fateful day at SOAS during a lecture in 2006. HHR had been going for some years now and one of its founders was silenced by Lord Desai when he dared to ask an intelligent question, rather than simply validate the points already made. On speaking to Kaviraj, he seemed once again his usual jovial self. Until I asked:
“How can you constantly warn of the dangers of Hindu fundamentalism yet follow Marxism when communism has been responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people?”
But is that not the point of education? Especially a ‘liberal’ arts one taught at a prestigious institution such as SOAS? That we learn, digest and reformulate? I met Kaviraj a couple of times afterwards. The first time he took issue with what I said yet to his credit admitted that he knew of people in the USSR who had been afraid to speak out and that communism was oppressive. He even admitted a surprising amount of knowledge on Shaivism in Kashmir , now fast becoming extinct because of unending jihad against Hindus there.
But the damage had been done. I had crossed that line that labelled me as the very demonic entity which India ’s‘secularists’ detest.
By this stage a whole new cohort had taken over which lacked the positive character traits which had made arguing with Kaviraj one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. It was this man’s lack of personal animus and lack of elitism which had set him apart from not just his Indian but also western colleagues. With the next encounters this basic human element was totally lacking. Unable to make a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme HHR was left to the mercies of Dr Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge .
This was surrounding the decision not to display the offensive artwork by MF Hussain which showed Hindu goddesses having sex with animals. Gopal said that HHR were too sacred to come onto the programme for which she was actually corrcted by the presenter.
In a conspiracy theory worthy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the academic went further and said HHR had created the menacing atmosphere which led to violence against the artwork. Yet at the same time we were an insignificant organisation which did not represent Hindus. Can Gopal not even get here conspiracy theories at least partially coherent? But then she does not need to. She has free reign to post her venom on the Guardian, that most anti-Hindu newspaper of liberal middle-class Britain .
Now while the Subaltern academics to which Kaviraj belongs do sometimes take issue with Marxism, this is not the case with Gopal. On Radio 4 she boasted how she was a ‘Hindu’ and denied Marxist labels. Yet only today in the anti-Hindu hate sheet the Guardian, this dogmatic behemoth has trumpeted at how ‘patriotic’Marxists are
Well by using that type of logic would Dr Gopal legitimise sales of Mein Kampf as indication of popular mood? Or Ku Klux Klan bedsheets? Is this Gopal creature aware that Marx believed India had to be ruled by the superior British because it was so backward and racially inferior? Gopal writes in a section of the Guardian entitled ‘Comment is Free’.Well it is ‘free’ just as long as you do not happen to make any overtly Hindu comments. This is a bit like India being free and democratic between the years 1975 and 1978 under the Emergency. It was all fine and dandy unless you happened to try and exercise your suspended constitutional rights such as ‘breathing’. Then again what can one expect from someone like Gopal? In 2010 she defended the hate book “The Hindus: An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger, American academic who shares her passionate hatred of Hinduism:
Here she again defends MF Hussain, a man so enthralled by democracy and free expression he was offered citizenship of Wahhabi Islamic Qatar. Gopal reduces Hinduism to a casteist and misogynist set of beliefs, and defends the Nazi idea of an Aryan race by mentioning the Indus Valley Civilisation as “pre-Hindu”.
It is perhaps ironic that an academic from Cambridge has the audacity to defend Marxism as patriotic to Britain when it was that hallowed institution which gave its host country such traitors as Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt who defected to the USSR . Hence the television serialisation of their treachery was called “Cambridge Spies”. Then again this is merely an extension of how India’s Marxists have constantly betrayed the country of their birth and worked for a socialist utopia which has only brought famine, genocide, social breakdown, slave labour camps and rampant xenephobia.
The final character in this list is Meena Dhanda, who arrived in the UK from Punjab , India in 1987 with an award of the Commonwealth Scholarship for her doctoral work in Philosophy at Balliol College , Oxford University . In 1992 she took up a full-time lecturing position at the University ofWolverhampton, and has remained here since then, progressing to a Readership in 2010.
Dhanda has taught critical reason, ethics, political philosophy, feminism, logic, epistemology and research methods (Masters) covering thinkers as diverse as Ambedkar, Aristotle, Beauvoir, Butler, Descartes, Fanon, Hume, Kant, Kuhn, Merleau-Ponty, Neitzsche, Nussbaum, Plato, Sartre, Williams, Wittgenstein and Young. This is ironic because in my encounters with her by email she has displayed virtues which are the diametric opposite.
This all began some years ago when discussing that same old chestnut, the caste system. Dhanda too great exception that a Hindu organisation would even have the gall to have its opinion on the issue, and especially that I would criticise Kancha Iliah’s book “Why I am Not a Hindu” as racist. Well it is. It is full of more racial mythology than the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi pseudoscientific institute that was to research the supposed archaeological and cultural history of the hypothesized “Aryan race.” Founded on July 1, 1935, by Heinrich Himmler, Herman Wirth, and Richard Walther Darré, the Ahnenerbe later conducted experiments and launched voyages in an attempt to prove that prehistoric and mythological Nordic populations had once ruled the world.
Reading this book one is struck by the sinister similarity between its ideas and those found in this Third Reich research unit and the operas of Richard Wagner.
Dhanda even went to far as to take issue with my mention of the Holocaust saying that was “conflating” an issue in the relationship between Jews and Christians. Conflating an ‘issue’? Is that what someone who supposedly encourages the youth to open their minds talks about the worst crime in human history?
Remember this Marxist academic like so many ‘useful idiots’ on the Left fights for the idealistic cause of outlawing caste discrimination. Unable to coherently even answer simple questions, this specimen of India ’s‘brainless’ drain refused to speak any further.
But then is it just being upset at different opinion or something more sinister. Reading the writings of VT Rajshekar on Dalit Voice, one is struck by the sheer anti-Semitism in caste discourse. Brahmans are said to be Jewish, controlling India with the help of Israel and American neocons. The Holocaust is a lie. Does that explain Dhanda’s hostility? Does she feel that to be anti-Hindu she also has to be anti-Semitic? Maybe, but it is something more basic. Marxist dialectics looks at history through purely materials. Spirituality in any form is backward. Hinduism is therefore the greatest threat to this materialistic methodology and on a very personal level. On Dhanda’s web page we learn this:
http://www.wlv.ac.uk/default.aspx?page=28288
“Primary research funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, on caste discrimination amongst urban Punjabis, both in the immigrant as well as the Indian population. This research focuses on mapping the experience of caste prejudice particularly in interpersonal relations. It also throws light on ways adopted by people to combat caste discrimination.”
When in doubt, follow the money. Academics need to make their research relevant. That means eliciting funds in the forms of donations and grants. That means keeping the crisis and issue alive. That means not looking for solutions. Whether its caste or MF Hussain paintings, anti-Hindu issues are an essential means of gaining the necessary funds to a secure future while a generation of graduates enter the job market unable to even get their first foot on the ladder.
This is as true with academics such as Gopal and Dhanda as it was with the Ahnenerbe in the Third Reich. It is not education. It is hatred pure and simple. While Nazi students under the direction of Dr Joseph Goebbels burned books by Dr Sigmund Freud and trashed the theoretical physics pioneered by Einstein, the anti-Hindu academics that dominate western universities ‘burn’ the ideas of modern Hindu thought by character assassination and malicious rumour.
When Goebbels yelled that he was burning the works of the “scoundrel Sigmund Freud”, the prize-winning psychologist said that at least they were not burning people. Well how wrong he was, because that is exactly what they would be doing only a few years later in the gas ovens of Auschwitz , in the greatest crime in history which Meena Dhanda believes should not be mentioned because it only “conflates” an issue.
The poisonous anti-Hindu diatribes and brainwashing is having the same genocidal consequences. Witness how South Asian studies in the West averts its gaze away from the genocide of Hindus in Pakistan , Bangladesh , Kashmir and other places. Or how Ian McDonald of the University of Brighton said that Hindu women and children deserved to die in Gujarat in 2002 because they were “extremists”. In other words vermin, subhuman, not fit to live. This is where brainwashing generations with anti-Hindu hatred leads us. Having personally encountered the mighty leviathans which hold the levers to power I have seen it develop first-hand. That is why it is essential to expose it and neutralise it.
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